Billie Ramsey

Willie Maud Ramsey The name given above is not a name that Mom liked she said that Willie Maud sounded like a mules name. In her younger days, she went by Billie and in her later days by Mimi. She was born in Cleburne County, Arkansas on February 5, 1925, the daughter of William Earl Mulliniks and Laura Pearl Vines Mulliniks. She was the fourth of twelve children born to the couple. She grew up in a rural area and had to do hard manual labor mostly farming work, e.g., chop cotton, feed the barnyard animals, milk the cows, etc. from an early age. She finished the 10th or 11th grade and had to drop out due to financial situations at home ---she later got her GED. She was very intelligent and it is regretful that she never got the opportunity to get a college education. In 1942, she and her sister Grace went to Shawnee, Oklahoma and got work inspecting eggs in a factory that was converting the raw eggs into powdered eggs for the military. She said that some of the girls didnt seem to care and would throw just anything into the buckets but she and Grace were careful because they were thinking about the boys in the service. It was here that Billie met her future husband, Osman Ramsey --- he was a sailor stationed at the large naval base in Shawnee. They consequently married and had two children, Laura Jeanne 1944 and Richard Russell 1946. After WW II ended, the family moved to Mr. Ramseys area of the country the Washington, D.C. area. In 1956, the two decided to separate and Billie went to Artesia, New Mexico where her parents lived with her two children in tow. She at first worked as a nurses aide at the Artesia General Hospital for a few years. She then became a telephone operator at the Mountain Bell Telephone Company in Artesia where she worked for over twenty years and rose to the level of the shop steward for the local CWA union which she had to leave when she joined management as the evening chief operator. Upon retiring from the phone company in 1979 on a disability, Billie moved back to the Maryland area to be near her children and continued here until her death on March 19, 2009 due to a series of massive strokes. Billie was a life-long Christian and had a strong sense of right and wrong she was often outraged by the wickedness of others. She passed this system of beliefs on to her children. She influenced many others although she herself would deny it. There was hardly anyone who ever met her that didnt immediately like her and was warmed by her quiet, Christian spirit. She devoted most of her life to her children and thought very little about herself and her personal wants. She enjoyed reading, particularly about ancient history and the early church. She was also very involved in genealogy and tracing out her family roots. She enjoyed listening to conservative talk radio Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc. and TV Bill OReilly and others. She will be sorely missed by those who knew her. She is survived by a sister, Hazel Isaacs of Carlsbad, New Mexico, and two brothers, Lynn Mulliniks of North Carolina and Stanley Mulliniks of Fort Worth, Texas, as well as her daughter and son, two granddaughters, Laura Shepherd and Julie Epstein of Berwyn Heights, Maryland and three great-granchildren, Damien Sautter, Kelvin Shepherd and Nina Shepherd.